DJs are Transition Masters... I used to tag along with my friend who was a weekend radio DJ when we were kids... He would explain the tempo transition, the cuts and fades, the fair use, the novelty introduced by the radio annoucer (DJ). He would demonstrate the queing of the song media, the events annoucements and the prize giveaways... His radio station had just transitioned to DAT tapes which impressed him. The songs had to play ON TIME or the cumulative time error would build up and sometimes he had to bump a song and play a different length or additional news announcement or station identifier to get the program schedule back on track. There's definitely a difference between a DJ and a playlist. The confusion your attempting to clarify lies in the novelty of a DJ'd production versus the limited perception of a smartphone user that's debating whether to hire a DJ or just press play themselves on their favorite playlist of their most favorite songs that are lined up in neat little digital rows with all tracks perfectly starting and stopping on a microsecond due to proliferation of digital music sales and the recording industry's catering to the one song per track format. In the old days, serialized tracks were novelties introduced by CDs for the purpose of enabling the skip button on Discmans and other CD players. Prior to the CD, tracks were a recording/production concept from the olden days of 8-track players which reimagined the pre-production recording track as a way to also distribute audio in parallel tracks for the purpose of listener novelty (pretending to "select" a new song, bypassing a degraded track like the scratch on a vinyl record, etc.). In reality, the albumn was the "experience" that people desired when attention spans were attuned to patiently seeking out some entertaining gem, shiny nugget of truth or signal amongst the noise. Before CD "tracks", the songs on the albumn would wander all over the place like the needle on a bad record player. Many songs were just recordings of novel concert performances and as a result the songs not only wandered, they blend and fade into each other like an organic work of art. Those modern minds were not dogmatically structured like the postmodern consumerist mind. I dare say, simple things like tracks have coralled the postmodern mind into strictures and mental blocks that perpetuate the conditioning and further enslavement of the human mind. Anywho, the track was initially an extremely arbitrary decision to make, especially on live recordings. CDs could play through and treat the track division as just a marker like a chapter marker in an audiobook or a timestamp in a utube video. Somehow the track eventually became "the new albumn" as radio singles were released as tracks and producers realized they could make the same or greater amount of money from one song as they could from a whole albumn recording in years past. Thus the track was crowned King by the consumers and producers. Now every song track has been sanitized to start and stop on que, with no interference with the previous or next song and we ALL now walk in straight, neat little lines of sterilized entertainment while imagining ourselves to be "Disc Jockeys" because we can drag and drop prerecorded songs into differently ordered lists and press the "play" button. Nothing could be more deceptive or further from the truth. It probably fits your limited budget better and helps you avoid a littany of wannabe "DJs" for hire, who also know how to press play, but in reality, a real DJ knows how to transition your "party" into an event. Unless you know how to interview for this quality, just stick to your "play"list, because that's all you're doing... just playing around. The DJ's job is to destroy this sanitized list of endless zombie tracks of pre-recorded prior art. Rather the DJ's reason for being is to transition your event into an organically crafted artform of novel adaptations which pay homage to the prior art while sculpting an entirely new event experience which will be remembered by your audience for years to come. A concert where the instruments are barely recognized as the old lifeless tracks they were, but woven into a sonic tapestry by the conductor ermself. Maybe you ARE the DJ and I've mistaken you by your use of the word "playlist". Please excuse my naivety. I bow in deference to your sonic skills.

Remember-

"Video did not kill the radio star. The CD track did."

- Ancient Nosterian Proverb